I focus on using the Internet, Inside Sales, Lead Generation, Gamification, and Social Media to grow business. I'm also an American who cares enough to speak up and a serial entrepreneur with a short attention span, so I need things to work really fast.

I am the President and Founder of InsideSales.com, the leading sales automation platform for inside sales professionals that I started with Dave Elkington, the other Founder and our amazing CEO, in 2004.

I speak at industry events, research industry topics, and my blog ranks first on ‘inside sales’ where I spend my time giving away (almost) all of our trade secrets www.KenKrogue.com.

Email me at kk@insidesales.com, connect on LinkedIn, follow me on Twitter, or best all, Circle me to access my latest stuff and quick summaries on Google+.

It costs dramatically less, takes much less time, and yields infinitely more return on investment. Great for startups who don’t want to give away the shop too soon.

Now to really divert a river, you shape need. Steve Jobs was a master at diverting a river, shaping need… anticipating the future. He used innovation and human ingenuity.

Look at his iPod.

Everyone loves music. That’s the river. SonySony built the Walkman for portable listening, first on cassette, then CD. They dug a well. MP3 players were around, but not exciting, no ‘sizzle’. Too hard to dig a well. It took some innovation… flash memory, simple interface, iTunes, deals with record labels, Bono and U2, and finally, The Beatles.

Steve Jobs diverted a river, he didn’t dig a well.

Look at his iPad, and the iPhone. They are relegating desktop computers to a support device. They diverted the river around them. Steve saw portable and mobile devices as bigger than the Internet. He was right.

I’ve heard more people have a mobile device around the world than a toothbrush. Really?

We learned this ‘divert a river’ rule again when we invested in the domain name for our company, InsideSales.com, in late 2004.

Why was this so powerful?

If you go to GoogleGoogle and type in the phrase ‘inside sales’, you see 277,000,000 results. Tens of thousands of companies hiring inside sales people. And we appear first, and second, and third. Then Wikipedia shows up. Then something about us appears fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth…

It is searched 60,500 times a month globally, 40,500 times monthly locally. That is over 60,000 searches with 9 ads appearing for our business every month. What would that cost? To us, it’s free.

Divert a river, don’t dig a well.

William E. (Bill) Baker's Water Era in St. George Begins. He tapped and diverted an underground 'river' that feeds the thriving retirement community in the middle of the desert. Taken from 'Making the Desert Bloom,' Copyright 2013 City of St. George

My grandfather, William E. (Bill) Baker, was over the water department in St. George, Utah. He found and developed most of the water sources that helped put St. George on the map. St. George is the thriving retirement community in southern Utah that wouldn’t be nearly what it is today.

Bill knew the value of water.

They have irrigated lawns and gardens with streams of flowing water in the gutters throughout all of St. George for the last half century. You lift the gate on the ditch to your yard and put a gate down in the main ditch and divert the flow during your watering time. If your yard is angled well, it even flows back into the gutter at the end of your property. When your time is up, you switch the gates again.

There was a little lady up stream who would sneak and steal my grandfather’s watering time. She would divert the water before it even got to him in the middle of the night. He often had to stand guard by looking out the window. Talk about feuding neighbors!

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Interesting concept that make me look for other examples. I think Instagram diverted the river of mobile device camera usage. Do you think that Google uses it’s trend and keyword data unfairly to it’s own advantage?

Thanks for pointing out the simplicity of the principle that drove the iPod, Salesforce.com, and InsideSales.com to their current positions. There is, of course, alot of work that goes into building successful organizations such as these, but the up front work of “creating” the need is done. Powerful stuff! Even Google did this initially. Everyone was searching in places like Yahoo…and Google came in and made the experience better…river divereted!

What a great concept. Take an idea and make it better. I love the story of Facebook as well as they were able to take MySpace and make it a faster growing and more liked platform. Instead of trying to dig a well and find your hole collapsing on itself, take your efforts and move a current from the current to where you foresee it being.

Mark Benioff or Steve Jobbs were definitely not the first the use this rule. Needs are relatively stable from generation to generation. The ways to deliver on those needs are constantly changing. Divert the river!